


Trivial Pursuits

by APgeeksout



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-15 16:04:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3453395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has spent more than her fair share of time in hospitals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trivial Pursuits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LoveChilde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveChilde/gifts).



Natasha has spent more than her fair share of time in hospitals.

She's been a patient in understaffed emergency rooms and cramped SHIELD medical bays and in dingy safe-houses, under the shaking hands of other operatives being forced to make use of their field training in first aid for the first time.

She's conducted interrogations of war criminals in prison infirmaries and interviewed traumatized witnesses from their bedsides in protective custody.

She's posed as a nurse, moving purposeful and invisible through busy hallways.  Sometimes to more closely guard a valuable asset. Other times – times that are haunting her in more ways than one since she's made SHIELD's files public – to ensure that a target never walked back out of the hospital.

In recent times, she's occasionally found herself becoming a fixture during visiting hours, calling on her colleagues. Her friends.

During Barton's last stay in isolation – seven days behind glass with a sealed air supply after exposure to a Hydra biological weapon - she'd calculated that the third day of confinement was when the average person, or at least the average Avenger, hit painful and snappish levels of stir-craziness.  Her teammates were adults and professionals, every one (even Stark, who so often found it useful to pretend otherwise) and she had every expectation that they could bear up under boredom. 

Still, she wasn't without pity (for the medical staff on Stark Industries's payroll, if not for the patient himself), and she'd brought the chess board, set it up in front of the observation window, and moved his pieces for him as he described through the crackling intercom.   He'd rounded out his time in containment teaching Thor the basic principles of Battleship (and losing every subsequent game), playing round after round of Sorry with an unflappable Banner, and going ignominiously bankrupt in a single, epic-length session of Monopoly with Pepper Potts and Maria Hill. 

They've started stocking the medical facilities they're using in lieu of the compromised SHIELD bases with Hoyle and Parker Brothers and Milton-Bradley as well as antiseptic and antibiotics and painkillers.

It still takes her by surprise - she could blame the contents of the IV line, the lingering effects of the anesthesia - when, on her second day propped in this bed, she's joined by Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, and Trivial Pursuit.  

She raises an eyebrow at the selection, and Sam answers her unspoken question.

"He likes picking up new cultural references, and I like being able to win at least one competition."

"Then you absolutely shouldn't play with me."

"If your ribs can take it, then so can my pride."

Natasha's spent more than her fair share of time in hospitals; she's finding it passes easier with friends. 


End file.
